Liberalism is currently the hegemonic world-view, capable of dictating its terms even to the very
movements that antagonise it. But does the history of liberalism really coincide with that of
modern democracy? In two of his recent works, Liberalism: A Counter-History and The Language
of Empire, Domenico Losurdo demonstrates that this is not the case. At its origin, liberalism was
not a universalistic defence of the individual’s freedom. On the contrary, it represented a demand
for wresting complete self-government of civil society from the monarch. However, given that
each society is traversed by deep differences and bitter conflicts, the emancipation from absolute
power turned into the possibility for the strongest individuals and social forces to exercise an
unprecedented absolute power over subaltern classes and ‘inferior races’. It was only after the
confrontation and clash with the demands of radicalism and socialism and two world-wars that
liberal thought was forced to make peace with the principles of democracy. However,
contemporary liberalism seems to have forgotten its own most-recent achievements and to have
returned to its eighteenth-century form: will modern democracy survive this involution?

Liberalism is currently the hegemonic world-view, capable of dictating its terms even to the very
movements that antagonise it. But does the history of liberalism really coincide with that of
modern democracy? In two of his recent works, Liberalism: A Counter-History and The Language
of Empire, Domenico Losurdo demonstrates that this is not the case. At its origin, liberalism was
not a universalistic defence of the individual’s freedom. On the contrary, it represented a demand
for wresting complete self-government of civil society from the monarch. However, given that
each society is traversed by deep differences and bitter conflicts, the emancipation from absolute
power turned into the possibility for the strongest individuals and social forces to exercise an
unprecedented absolute power over subaltern classes and ‘inferior races’. It was only after the
confrontation and clash with the demands of radicalism and socialism and two world-wars that
liberal thought was forced to make peace with the principles of democracy. However,
contemporary liberalism seems to have forgotten its own most-recent achievements and to have
returned to its eighteenth-century form: will modern democracy survive this involution?